selenak

Which is to say, I'm back, as of this noon, and very very tired, but in a good way. Also, it will take me several days to catch up with my mail and fannish things, so I beg your leave for a) not spoiling me about anything and b) waiting for replies a while longer.

Now, on to a two part pic spam (to make life easier on your screens and mine.)

The working part of my (third) visit to Tanzania can be summed up best with this picture, which is taken in the hopelessly overcrowded classroom of a school some friends, my family & self are supporting there:

To wit, not only do they need more room in this school, they need another school in addition to this one. As it is, about 80 - 100 students share a classroom. (The school was originally built for ca. 200-300 students and now has 711, four years after it started.) So there were a lot of meetings with teachers, the leaders of the Maasai community the children of the school belong to, the local MP, etc. All in all, things are looking well now.

The school isn't that far away from the Ngorongoro Crater, which is one of the most magnificent regions for wildlife in Tanzania. A kind of "lost world", if you like, to be found in the middle of a former volcano crater.

Allow me to start small, with the warthog:

There are also herds of buffalos:

African buffalos are reportedly more aggressive than lions and elephants put together. We didn’t push our luck, but:

And of course lots and lots of wildebeest (more of them later):

The main attraction are rhinos, but they were a case for my agent parent and his super camera, and I don't have access to his photos yet. You'll get some closeups in later days. Also guaranteed to be there are lions, like this young male fellow, who is about a year old and the equivalent of a teenager:

And when you wake up, you're greeted with this sight:

However, our most successful animal admiring expedition didn't take place in the Ngorongoro region itself, but in the ca. two to three hours distance away Ndutu. Again, let's start small, with gazelles and antelopes:

And move on to impalas and some zebras:

I'll have you Supernatural fans know I photographed the Impalas only for you. They're cuter then the car. Around this time, the migration of wildebeests and zebras was between the Serengeti and Ndutu, more near Ndutu, so we saw quite a lot of them. It's impossible to describe the effect ist has if you're surrounded by these endless herds stretching from horizon to horizon, and photos can't really capture it, either. Some poor excerpts:

Now, with all this meat, there are of course a lot of predators around. We were incredibly lucky and got to see the lot. First, check out these cheetas (whom we found on an early morning drive, bellies still full with last night's meal and thus not inclined to run away (cheeta are very shy otherwise, and Ndutu is one of the few regions where you're allowed to drive off road and near them anyway):

No, I didn't name them Ace, Karra and the Master. :)

Before I present our next encounter with another feline, this one in the hierarchy above the cheeta and the rarest of animals to be sighted, have some giraffes, to be found between Ngorongoro and Ndutu. I love watching giraffes. They move like seawaves.